


Burned Out

by nescias



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: 13 is sad and not good at accepting help, Angst, Depression, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Episode: s12e10 The Timeless Children, but honestly what else is new, she gets a hug in the end tho don't worry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-21
Updated: 2020-07-27
Packaged: 2021-03-03 22:33:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 8,989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24833149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nescias/pseuds/nescias
Summary: Hoping can feel too much like hurting, when trapped alone for so long.The Timeless Child has escaped the Judoon prison after many years trapped in a solitary cell, but the Doctor has been left behind.
Relationships: Thirteenth Doctor/Yasmin Khan
Comments: 24
Kudos: 126





	1. I Might Just Leave Soon

**Author's Note:**

> Title (and chapter titles) based on the song Burned Out by Dodie

The Doctor laughed without joy, and kicked the wall again and again, jarring her smarting ankle. It twisted badly when they were dragging her into her cell, but now the pain was fading into the background buzzing in her head.

She could have tried to hold it together, for her fam. But they weren’t here anymore.

And, if she was being honest with herself, she had been falling apart for a long time now. The fam could only ask so many variations of “are you okay” and “who are you” before it became clear that her mask wasn’t as securely attached as she had hoped.

She was here, in this small cell, alone. After so long running from the images burning into the back of her eyes, she was stuck here just to _think._

Thinking, she mused, tended to feel an awful lot like rotting.

She closed her eyes and watched Gallifrey burn, watched herself burn, watched a small child fall off a cliff over and over again, wreathed in streams of gold.

  
  


Time never blended together or faded. Whoever the idiots were who talked about “seconds blurring together” had clearly never experienced solitary confinement.

Or maybe they had just never been immortal progenitors of a race that had dubbed themselves the lords of time. Hard to say, really.

The lights never shut off, and the meals were randomized, but still she felt every passing second slip through her fingers.

  
  


She had tried to escape, of course. She had so very many hours to whittle away at it.

In a room of all white padding, there were no objects at her disposal. Her thin grey clothing they had foisted upon her offered nothing of use. She never saw another living being, and the walls seemed to have some manner of psychic dampener given that she could sense absolutely nothing.

All she had was a little metal grate affording her a view of the stars.

When she finally became desperate enough to try and pull a Confession Dial Escape Part II, gripping at the grate and violently rocking to hopefully damage the weakest piece of the room, she found herself knocked unconscious.

When she awoke, there were no stars, and the sterile white wall was unbroken by any hint of the grate she had spent so many hours, days, months pressed against longingly.

There was nothing else they could take away from her now, but the restless fear curled inside of her and never quite let go.

  
  


She half-expected her fam to come through for her, or for some old friend to break her out. She was the Doctor of Hope, after all.

She didn’t ever really notice the hope fading, only checked years later to find it gone. That was okay. The hoping felt an awful lot like hurting. She didn’t hurt anymore, not like she once did.

  
  


The thing is, given a long enough span of time, the statistically improbable becomes inevitable. When a rogue blackout hit the prison (her best guess was a solar hurricane from the closest star system, but she didn’t have enough information) shutting off all electronic security systems, she threw herself into the door over and over until the manual backup failed.

She stumbled out into the hallway, tottering like a newborn lamb. 

“Okay, okay.” The Doctor whispered to herself. “Here we go then, Doctor.”

Some other prisoners seemed to have taken the opportunity as well, she noticed after exiting the isolation block. Even as the system came back online piece by piece, cameras and locks flickering back awake, there were too many angry bodies pressing through the hallway to be easily stopped.

It had become a full-blown prison riot, the herd breaking through doors. Prisoners were being picked off and contained by the guards, but so too were guards being taken down by masses of prisoners.

The mob had just enough inertia, it should be able to reach the doors.

There was noise and light and color, all so _much_ after carefully-uncounted years of solitary confinement. People were getting hurt, prisoners and guards alike, and undoubtedly some awful criminals were going to escape.

The Doctor should probably care. She didn’t. She stayed silent as the crowd around her bellowed in anger, head fuzzy and body numb as she let herself be swept along with the tide.

Eventually, only a line of guards and a final door stood between them and freedom. The door had metal bars that offered the barest glimpse of the stars. When the Doctor saw just one, she felt it well up in her, pulling her forward—she needed OUT, right _now_.

The Doctor had been a pacifist once. Now, she roared with the hurt of years stolen away, years she couldn’t remember, years where she was alone under the wide sky. She leapt at the guards with the strongest of the prisoners, managing to temporarily paralyze the first with dredged up venusian aikido.

When her arm was grabbed, her second take-down was more inelegant, a head-slam that caused the guard to drop unconscious.

It was good that he hadn’t been Judoon, she supposed, or that would’ve been much more unpleasant for her.

A snapping sound filled the air as another prisoner broke the final lock, and they rushed out onto the asteroid surface.

Of the hundreds that must have been freed in the entire compound, only five of them had made it through. Three were of species she couldn’t easily communicate with without the TARDIS translation matrix, but the one beside her looked human. The Doctor’s best guess was that she was a half-human from after the human empire reached out into the stars.

She looked so young, so human. The girl reminded the Doctor of Yaz, and her hearts ached.

Sensing the scrutiny, the girl looked over as their small group made a break for the starship docks. She smiled at the Doctor, open and giddy with the joy of freedom.

“Not to be too clichéd, but what were you in for?” the woman asked.

The Doctor laughed so hard she nearly cried. “I don’t even know.”

The woman laughed too, though it wasn’t at all funny, and they kept running.

The starships reserved for prisoner collection missions and resource acquisition were high tech by this millennium’s standards, but laughably basic compared to Time Lord engineering. The five of them piled into the bay, sealing and locking the entrance after them. There were enough starships for each to take their own, but it was clear that only the Doctor and not-Yaz had any piloting experience by the way the others hesitated.

The Doctor climbed up into the cockpit of the fastest cruiser, refamiliarising herself with the universalized control system. The other prisoners climbed aboard, and not-Yaz slipped into the co-pilot’s seat, grinning over at the Doctor.

The Doctor closed the doors, and took off.

She should probably care that she was ferrying unknown criminals across the galaxy..

“Where are you taking us, then?” the woman asked.

The Doctor blinked, and looked over at her nav system. They were in an uninteresting set of star systems, but the ship’s warp drive was fast enough to make its way to any area of this galaxy within a day or so.

The Doctor looked over. “Wherever you like. Where’s home for you?”

“Martep.”

“Ah,” the Doctor said, “good planet, that. Good colony, right now. Brilliant cities later, make sure to stick around for that bit. Shouldn’t be too hard to get you there.”

The woman smiled at her. “My name’s Ionna.”

The Doctor hesitated. She was ferrying (probably) awful criminals across the galaxy to freedom. She had lost her hope, her family, and her own past. She didn’t feel much like the Doctor anymore, she realized. It should have unsettled her more, but it felt like shedding an old skin that no longer fit. 

“Theta Sigma,” she settled on.

Ionna looked at her with warm brown eyes. “It’s good to meet you, Theta Sigma. Thank you for helping.”

Theta approximated a smile and nodded. They were minutes away from Martep. Once she released all her passengers, she would be free to track down her Ghost Monument.

  
  


“Thank you again, Theta Sigma,” Ionna said, leaning forward to press a kiss against her cheek.

The small pack of criminals had climbed out of the starship at Martep, presumably to track down a ride home or to start anew. They may have committed any manner of crime, but they treated Theta with only kindness and respect. Kinship, she suspected. Criminals of a feather—even though only one of them had feathers, and sadly she couldn’t match up to his vibrant multicolored display.

The Doctor would have known how to respond. She should say something kind, or encourage these misfits to go make the world a better place.

Theta Sigma was not the Doctor. She just nodded once, and climbed into the commandeered starship.

Her fingers skimmed over the controls, dancing between buttons and switches to take off again.

Luckily, she knew her TARDIS thoroughly after so many years travelling together. She sent out a scan for its unique psychic signal, locating the box drifting through space not too far away. 

“Found you, dear,” she said.

Really, much as she had wondered about the master plan behind capturing her, it seemed mostly dumb coincidence. Her shields down for a few moments after the previous “adventure” combined with drifting into just the wrong part of space to set off the prison’s scanners.

There was still the question of exactly what crime they had been taken her for—but that could wait. She had spent so long in that prison already.

She felt like a shell, all of the softer inside bits rotted away. Theta craved the presence of the TARDIS in her mind, helping to fill all those cavernous empty spaces.

She flicked warp drive on, steering herself toward her home. At the speed she was going, it took almost no time at all until the scanners beeped their proximity warnings, and she dropped back to regular speed.

There, in the distance, floated her lovely box.

Theta set the ship to autonav closer. She left the cockpit, travelling over to the loading door on the side of the craft. When she was close enough, she flicked it open, allowing the TARDIS’s projected forcefield to envelop her with fresh air.

Those doors, centerpiece of her longing for so many years, drifted right in front of her. A short leap out, and she clutched at the front of her Ghost Monument.

“Oh.” Her eyes welled up with unexpected tears as her mind connected back with her closest friend. The TARDIS brushed along her mind, leaving a trail of _love, concern, welcome_ . She gasped again with the force of the feelings, the beauty of being _not alone_ for the first time in—decades, probably, though her mind shied away from thinking too hard of how long it had really been.

The console room looked the same, but she found it awe-inspiring in its beauty.

“Hello, old girl,” she whispered reverently, walking up to glide her fingertips across the familiar controls. She pressed once on the biscuit pedal, taking a bite of the treat the TARDIS offered. “I’m home.”


	2. Oh, How Fitting for One So Fake

First, she showered. Her cell didn’t allow her to physically decay the way she should’ve, but using hot water and spicy soap to scrub her skin raw still felt like it removed weight from her, even if only mentally.

When she climbed out, the grey uniform tossed on the floor had already been removed. Next to the sink was folded a clean pair of pajamas, black flannel with a rainbow stripe across the chest. It was just _her_ enough without feeling too _Doctor_.

She reached through her telepathic bond with the TARDIS to send gratitude, and the TARDIS chimed back with warm contentment and joy that she was home.

Theta wandered out of the bathroom and into her bedroom. It looked the same as always, projects-in-progress and notes sprawled across every surface right where she had left them. She made her way to the large blue bed, curling up on its soft sheets under a heavy blanket.

As with the shower, there was technically no reason why she should need to sleep now, as she couldn’t accumulate tiredness in her cell and hadn’t been free of it long enough to be this far along in her sparse sleep cycle.

Nevertheless, she curled up and closed her eyes.

She expected nightmares, but instead was tugged into a heavy blackness.

Theta woke with a keening cry lodged in her throat, and tear tracks flowing down her face into her pillow. She frowned, and reached a finger up to touch her damp cheek, curious. She had dreamt of nothing at all.

She stood, allowing her vision a moment to settle. The sticky darkness of sleep still clung to her brain, making her slow and dull.

Theta made her way out to the console room. “‘Mornin’, sexy,” she said with a grin, and got a few friendly bleeps back from the console. It was good to be back with the TARDIS.

Theta walked up to the controls, tasting her hands on them without pressing anything.

The TARDIS nudged her mind with potent concern, and she flapped her hand as if clearing smoke. “Fine, ‘s fine.”

The screen lit up as the ship programmed in coordinates, trying to nudge her thief forward. Theta turned to the screen, blinking against sleep-blurriness to read the small print.

Sheffield, 2020, right after when her friends would have landed safely back on Earth. To them, she could reappear in minutes, making it seem like she had barely been gone at all. Oh, they’d have worried when travelling home by themselves, and she’d be showered in hugs and joy as they got her back.

She could stroll back into their lives, grin and laugh and call herself the Doctor because she _fixes things_ , and everything could be back on track.

It sounded good. It’s what she _wanted_. So why did the thought of pretending she hadn’t spent decades alone with an unknown future and unknowable past make her feel sick?

Her breathing sped up. And, just like that, _she_ would be forgotten. Because all that would matter is the Doctor, the tour-guide Doctor who did no wrong and was always right. Who was willing to risk her life for others, but always survived at the end of the story because she was a _hero_.

Theta was breathing too quickly, too shallowly, chest tight. Her respiratory bypass kicked in, recycling oxygen to keep her conscious.

She needed to go back to them, to Ryan, Yaz, and Graham. They would want it, and they deserved it. She had to. Maybe it would even help stem the relentless tide of concern-fear-love the TARDIS was flooding her with as she struggled to protect her thief. She knew what everyone needed her to do—so why wasn’t she doing it?

The destination was on the screen, taunting her.

She turned and ran, instead, dodging into a random corridor and letting herself get lost in the maze of hallways.

She could travel in time, Theta reasoned, trying to run from the guilt. A few more days to herself, and she could go back to Sheffield in that exact instant, with nothing having changed at all. She just needed time, a bit more time.

The TARDIS didn’t like her reasoning as much, beeping her disagreement with the plan, but not stopping her.

Eventually, she came to the end of the random branch of hallways she had taken, in front of a random door. Though she had been wandering this ship for thousands of years, it had more rooms than she could have fully explored in four and a half billion, so she had no clue where she was.

Opening the door revealed a rainforest, deep green with flashes of color moving overhead. Sounds of birds and water and creatures filled the air, no less beautiful for having been simulated.

Theta took what felt like her first deep breath since entering the console room, chasing back the darkness that had been creeping up the corners of her vision and finally giving her respiratory bypass a break.

In front of her, tied between the eye hooks embedded in two towering trees, swung a mesh hammock. She breathed deeply for a moment, enjoying the moist air, before making her way over to it and curling up inside.

It was lucky she was still in the pajamas, she supposed, as she curled up to nap. It made it easier to just sway here in the air, quiet and listening, as sunlight diffused down through the leaves above.

She was warm here. She wasn’t exactly happy, but neither was she unhappy, and that was enough. Theta was content just to _be_ for now.

For the first time in her memory, barring illnesses like regeneration sickness, she fell asleep for the second time in one day.

The endless darkness was there to greet her, and she welcomed its restful quiet with open arms.

Awareness came slowly, first in warmth then in sound then in actual thoughts. Theta Sigma wondered if this was how humans always got to experience sleep.

If so, she supposed she understood why they slept every night.

After laying there just a bit longer, she tilted out of the hammock and made her way back to the door. The TARDIS was echoing with melancholy, and she wondered why. She felt much calmer than she had before, so there was no more need for concern now.

A quick trip back to her room allowed her to change out of the pajamas, accepting her old outfit and settling back into the soft shirt, the worn boots, the heavy coat. After, Theta allowed herself to be guided back to the console room.

She cleared the currently-input coordinates without another look at the screens. There would be time for that later. For now, she needed to go out into the universe alone.

It was easy to pull up one of the many distress calls that had been stored earlier. The Doctor had always received more than could be answered promptly (and plenty of suspicious ones that were likely spam calls or false alarms), so there was always a thick backlog to sort through and pluck possible adventures out of for her companions.

The one Theta settled on was one of the ones she had planned on tackling with the fam. Something about problems with wild animals becoming more aggressive. Likely low-risk if handled correctly, but still compelling enough to make an adventure out of.

She flitted over to the steering system, clocking in the call’s coordinates.

It felt so right to lock into that familiar dance, spinning around the console in carefully measured steps until her ship took her to everywhere.

Once they landed, a quick step outside (and taste of the soil) told her everything she needed to know: goldilocks planet, mostly hunter-gatherers, remarkably unstable agriculture for a civilization advanced enough to send her a distress call. All pointing to there being an abundance of food in the environment, to allow engineering of advanced systems without large-scale farming.

A glance around confirmed this; lush plant life, mostly mid-to-low size but with occasional taller bursts of fern. Paths had been worn into the ground, with many bipedal tracks but occasional larger quadrupedal prints.

Altogether, an interesting world, but not an outwardly remarkable one. The Doctor closed the TARDIS door behind her, before following the largest and most worn path.

It sloped gently upward into a thickening number of tall ferns—she was tempted to call it a forest. There was some quip to be made here about seeing a forest but not the trees, but without companions to appreciate it Theta didn’t bother.

The path led her to a large clearing in the fern-forest. She stumbled out into a village; it seemed to be centered around a bustling square full of shop stalls and wanderers, with curving arms of thatch-roofed buildings radiating out from the center.

The chance of this village having recreated the shape of their spiral galaxy so exactly, including the slightly wobbly-looking Golden Arm of Thesania, was quite small; despite the constructions all being made of plant fiber and stones, it was clear that this civilization was much more advanced than appearances led one to believe.

When she strode toward the center of the town, more and more people turned to gawk. Well, that’s probably a usual reaction to a pinkish creature with yellow hair wandering into your civilization of purplish-blue people, she supposed.

When she reached the central market, everything was quiet and still except for excited little whispers between the citizens.

Theta cleared her throat, drawing the few eyes that hadn’t already been glued to her every move. “You called for help?”

A moment of whispering more, and then one of the people stepped forward. They were one of the tallest, with intricate maps of the night sky painted across their indigo skin in startling realism.

Theta envied him. She had spent so many years in the grey and white prison; it would be no exaggeration to say she would have murdered to bring the stars with her.

The clear leader regarded her before speaking: “Oh wise and noble Doctor—”

“Theta Sigma,” she interrupted, annoyed.

They blinked before frowning at her. “We called on the Doctor, and were told that the Doctor’s ship had arrived.”

She just shrugged one shoulder. “And you got me instead. Hi. Can we cut to the bit where you tell me what the problem is?”

The leader cleared their throat, eyes flickering for a moment as they seemed to jump through their planned speech to the bit she requested. “We have been terrorized by the local wildlife lately, as the Venandi that roam our forest have injured our people. Lord Doc—er, Lord Theta Sigma, we humbly request that you put an end to the Venandi terrorization of our people.”

To be completely honest, she was already restless on this planet and wanted to launch herself immediately back into the Time Vortex, but that wasn’t really her modus operandi.

“Okay, wild creatures suddenly attacking, check. Anything strange happen lately? Any new discoveries pumping weird chemicals into the environment, or something?”

They looked at her with incredulity. “When people call on you for help, is the answer often so obvious and inane?”

She just shrugged again. “You’d be surprised. Any image of the Vanandi for me to go off of, then?”

The leader summoned over another person, who approached Theta to show her a small holographic projection of the creature. It looked kind of like a wolf, if you had never seen a wolf before and had also recently taken a hard blow to the head.

Theta knew she should probably stay and gather more information from these people, but she itched to be away from them, and so only gave a curt “I’ll look into it” before striding back out into the fern-forest alone.

The path from earlier had plenty of paw-tracks that matched the creature she had been shown, so Theta took the direct route of following one off into the brush.

It was risky, but she had no one to protect.

Theta followed the tracks for a long while, climbing deeper into the unknown wilderness.

As she followed, the tracks met up and merged with other Venandi tracks that seemed to be travelling to the same source.

When Theta stepped past a particularly thick layer of waist-high plants out into a clearing full of the snarling beasts of all different sizes and coat patterns and scars, it became apparent why; clearly, she had wandered directly into their den.

“Hi there,” she said, mouth grimacing in its attempt to smile. “Didn’t mean to interrupt. _Well_ , I suppose I did, sort of, but this wasn’t particularly what I had in mind.”

The creatures kept their hackles raised and teeth bared, but the fact that none immediately lunged for her was probably a good sign.

From among them, one of the creatures tentatively padded up to her, and she kept still and silent in the hopes of not being seen as a threat. It sniffed over her, nudging in turn at her hands or her pockets or her coat in order to completely inspect her.

The whuffs of warm air felt kind of nice. She had always envied humankind’s close bonds with their companion animals; she had had no comparable experience on Gallifrey, but the loyalty and love offered without invasive questions about her past seemed nice. Too bad her adventures were too dangerous for such indulgences.

Finally satisfied with its investigation, the creature stepped back and made a melodic rumbling sound; Theta immediately winced from a bad psychic headache, though sound waves alone shouldn’t usually cause that effect. What was happening here?

At the sound, the Venandi in the camp settled back down. They seemed to be social creatures, rumbling at each other or playing basic games like rolling objects back and forth.

The Venandi that had inspected her seemed to accept her presence, as it made a lighter sound that was unmistakably friendly, and wagged both of its tails at her.

What was going on? There was something really obvious here, something she was missing, something looking her right in the face. Why would a species that supposedly had gotten intensely aggressive have welcomed her into their camp, seeming friendly and willing to trust her?

What was niggling at her about what she was seeing?

She closed her eyes, focused. Wild animals from the forest were becoming aggressive, randomly attacking citizens with no warning. Think. What didn’t make sense?

She hadn’t been attacked. And why not? Because she didn’t look or smell like the natives here?

Which meant that the Venandi weren’t attacking _randomly_ at all, they had to be choosing.

“Oh,” she exhaled. “Oh!” Her jumping alerted the nearby Venandi, who pricked their ears toward her warily.

They were playing simple games—a sign of developing intelligence. The sounds they made back and forth must be some form of communication. _That_ must be the cause of the psychic headache; it had been so long since she had bumped into a language that the TARDIS translation matrix could make no sense of that she had forgotten the feeling.

So: _intelligent_ creatures, capable of social bonds and (probably) language, attacking only one other species. It sounded like war, then. Why—resources? Impossible to answer with a species whose language she could make no sense of.

Theta was buzzing with the elation of answers.

“Thank you, you’ve been a great help, I’ll have this settled soon,” she said to the Venandi that had inspected her. It only tilted its head at her eagerness.

She gave an awkward little bow to it before dashing back out of camp, following her own tracks to the bipedal people’s village.

She rushed in, once more interrupting their daily habits without a care. “I’ve solved it!” she cried, getting back into the swing of a good puzzle. This one had been fast, but its clean resolution was making herself feel more alive, more like the Doctor, than she had felt in a long time.

She moved right to the leader. “The Venandi—what are your people’s relation to them? Are you in competition for resources or land, by any chance?”

Theta was surprised when the leader cracked into demeaning laughter, as though she was a small child asking silly questions.

After a few moments of laughter, they said, “there’s no need to compete with our prey, is there? Our people have been very easily hunting the Venandi for many generations.”

Theta frowned. That did, in fact, explain the animosity.

“The Venandi are actually more intelligent creatures than it seemed,” Theta said. “I believe that they are attacking because you keep killing them. If you would stop hunting them and leave their home alone, that would solve your issues with being hunted in return. Your people have started a war, intentionally or not.”

The leader frowned openly at her now. “ _Stop_ hunting them? But their meat and pelts are well-deserved luxuries to our people!”

Theta felt herself growing frustrated, but tried to rein in her growing anger. “But the Venandi are intelligent and social enough to avenge their fallen. Surely you can eat plants and animals that _don’t_ have a language and culture?”

The leader looked down at her, eyes squinted. “I will take your advice under consideration, then, if you believe that is the core of the issue.”

Theta Sigma still felt uneasy about this whole situation, but couldn’t explain why. She’d won, hadn’t she? She’d solved an easy problem, and had brought the solution to someone who had promised it fair consideration. What more was there to be done?

Reluctantly, she nodded and allowed some tension to leak from her shoulders. The leader smiled at her, with a touch less derision than before.

“Your help in discovering the core of this issue was much appreciated; we were not aware that the Venandi were getting clever enough to fight back. Would you stay a night here, in thanks?”

Theta tried to decline the offer, but they insisted, and rest sounded too good to pass up.

Theta was led to a hut by villagers quietly murmuring to each other as though she couldn’t hear them.

It was only a few moments after she laid down that the inky blackness enveloped her.

She woke pressed against the dirt floor of the hut she had stayed in, limbs tangled in her sheets as though she had violently thrown herself off the side. Where her face met the dirt, small dips of salty mud were forming.

From outside, light filtered in through the gap between the door and the wall, along with the sounds of a celebration. Warm peals of children’s laughter finally warmed her enough to get her muscles in gear.

Theta righted herself, shaking off the darkness and stepping out into the morning.

She quickly regretted doing so, as from the door of her hut came the image of the town center; merry people gathered around chatting, and children playing running games between the stacks of dead Venandi piled up.

She looked in mute horror, though her mind could not stop itself from counting the corpses. More than three times what was in the Venandi camp yesterday, just of what she could see from her hut.

This wasn’t a regular hunt. It looked like they had intentionally wiped out as many of them as possible.

Feeling sick, Theta stumbled her way toward the spectacle, bumping into the leader along the way.

“Isn’t it wonderful?” they asked, radiating more joy than she had seen from them so far. “We’ve hunted all of the Venandi, now.”

“Why?” she managed to ask.

“Well, according to you, they were getting smart enough to retaliate. This way, we get both the largest feast our village has ever seen, _and_ the guarantee that none of our people are hurt anymore. Isn’t it wonderful?”

Theta was still for a long moment. “I told you that there was intelligent life, capable of social bonds and kindness… and your first response was to kill it?”

They frowned at her, puzzled. “Was it not the obvious answer?”

Vaguely, Theta realized why the translation matrix had struggled to parse the Venandi’s communication. It clearly hadn’t been allowed to develop long enough to become a true language. It had been wiped out before then.

She felt sick.

Theta pushed bodily past the leader and through the crowd, ignoring their indignation. She did her best to ignore the piles of bodies she left behold as she left the village.

She didn’t remember walking further or thinking or even breathing; the next thing she knew, she was curled up in a ball under the TARDIS central console, the familiar feeling of being in the Time Vortex permeating the room.

Her face was damp, and some of the fabric of her coat had been damaged where she had been pulling it so tightly around herself.

The TARDIS was cooing soothing noises at her, trying to help, but she felt numb.

The worst part wasn’t even this planet—though knowing your presence led people to eradicate a species of budding intelligence was awful enough.

No, the worst part was the memories.

The Doctor, in all their escapades, had left so much carnage like this behind. She had tried to help, tried so hard, and yet death piled up behind her.

She could condemn these people, but hadn’t humans like Harriet Jones been the same? Hadn’t the Time Lords, the people she had made (that had been made from her) wrought the same cruelty?

She ached with all the death she had caused, all the pain that need not have been suffered.

She had caused the death of these innocent beings by convincing the people of this planet to exterminate them.

And really, if you followed this train of thought to its conclusion—hadn’t _she_ been the one responsible for the creation of the Time Lords, without whom there would not have been Time Wars to wipe out trillions (or quadrillions, or quintillions…) of innocent lives across the universe?

How much hatred and pain and death had always followed in her wake, as she ran?

Theta had rejected the Doctor’s cheeriness and bumbling attempts at optimism, but now the ugly truth of her true naïvety was becoming clear: wherever the Doctor insisted on trying to play god, death and pain followed.

Theta swallowed down another well of tears. No more, she promised herself. No more.

She couldn’t keep hurting people like this, destroying lives and civilizations of her own blind ignorance.

It was time for the Timeless Child to finally grow up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Do I *look* like I know how pacing works?
> 
> Expect the fam showing up in the next chapter, and the final chapter being the emotional resolution.


	3. Words Only Get Through if They're Sharp

She looked out over the small bar she was resting in today. There were only a few patrons here, enough to chase away that darkness but not enough to overwhelm her with sound and motion.

Theta sighed into her glass of who-knows-what, in a bar she forgot the name of on a small planet she had never bothered to learn the name of in the first place. The anonymity was lonely, and comforting in its loneliness.

She would go back to her friends soon and slot into their lives like she’s never left… but every time she had come to the TARDIS console so far, she found herself choosing pointless distractions over and over. She didn’t have the energy for daring adventures right now, and she found it hard to care enough to go seek out planets to save.

Instead, Theta found herself wandering around empty corners of the universe, spending days reading or thinking before slipping back to the TARDIS to sleep. Why did it have to be her fixing the universe endlessly? Why was she stuck on this treadmill? Couldn’t she ever just _rest_?

So that’s what she did, as best she knew how.

In a way, it’s the fastest she had ever managed to run. Theta chuckled to herself at the thought, and swirled her glass before taking another sip. Who knew the best way she’d ever find to run from herself would be in staying so still?

She paid for her drinks by throwing a credit stick to the bartender. Who knew how much money was loaded on it, really. It was equally likely that she had just stiffed him as that she had made him wealthy beyond his wildest dreams.

She wandered through the darkened town for a little bit, meandering through quiet streets to make her way back to her ship.

Touching the blue wood, her mind was flooded with the now-familiar refrain of _exasperation concern annoyance love_ that was the TARDIS’s mind, and Theta pushed back as much love as she could muster. Her ship had been such a good friend recently. Soon they’d travel back together to pick up the fam, and everything would be alright again.

For now, Theta made her way past the blinking console (with Sheffield’s coordinates already loaded in again, since her ship had long forgone subtlety) and into the hallways, winding through randomly until she came across another room she had never seen before.

Although the blue tufts of grass looked unfamiliar, the simulated stars far above in the new room allowed her to easily place where this planet was supposed to be, so she laid down under the night sky to let her eyes trace those familiar constellations.

Maybe this would be the next trip, visiting the planet that this room was based on — if it indeed existed.

Theta looked up into the darkness and felt empty as the void of space. It was a good feeling; empty didn’t hurt, not like she used to hurt.

She closed her eyes, already expecting the wave of blackness that pulled her under.

Theta woke again in what her mind told her was many hours later, though the room still projected a full night sky. She swiped at her face and exited the room, wandering back to the console room.

It was easy to slip under the console and continue the advanced repairs she had spent a lot of time on recently. Really, with all the work and upgrades she was putting into the old girl, this was the smoothest and most accurately they had flown in millennia.

After a few hours of work and a couple minutes of closing all of the control panels again, Theta popped back up to the console, smearing engine oil across her face with an old rag.

“Alright old girl, where shall we pop off to today?”

The TARDIS bleeped at her and highlighted Sheffield’s coordinates again, radiating resignation as her pilot closed them out for the nth time.

“Soon, soon, I promise. Just… not today?”

A flood of _incredulity, worry, longing_ met her words. Theta felt bad for brushing her oldest friend off like that, she truly did, but — she couldn’t go back yet. She just couldn’t.

Her fam would want the Doctor back eventually, of course, but that was just it: they wanted the _Doctor_.

The thought of having to try to fit into that old skin made her itch. Compressing the multitudes of herself she had just learned about and all of the change she had undergone alone in a cell into the happy, do-no-wrong Doctor — well, she had already been struggling with the façade when it was only her planet that had burned. 

Now she had been burned out as well, and she didn’t know what to do.

She instead searched for the planet she had wandered into a simulation of, and locked into a random spot on its surface.

A pull of the lever, a smooth hop through space, and she was back out into the night. It felt more vivid, the real version. There was a whistling sigh to the wind the TARDIS didn’t quite capture.

It was too soon to sleep again, but Theta let herself sink into the coarse blue grass and let herself just breathe, for a long while.

It wasn’t unpleasant, laying there and letting her mind drift away from herself, but eventually some thought drew her back to the present. No, not a thought, that wasn’t the right word — a psychic smell? Time itself had a sour tang as it pulsed, and she stuck her tongue out as though her physical taste buds might better help her mind latch onto why the flavor seemed so familiar.

The pieces all clicked together too slowly, leaving her only moments to scramble away before the familiar dimensional blip.

A vortex manipulator, of course. Cheap and nasty time travel.

And, judging by her current location in the middle of absolutely nowhere, someone was following her, which was very _not good_ considering that last time it had ended in being taken away to a cell, left to rot for decades.

Theta’s breathing sped up and her vision blurred as she focused on how she would make her escape. Four figures appeared from the Vortex, but she was already in action, trying to dodge around where they stood between her and the TARDIS.

Immediately, there was shouting, and the most physically imposing —the corner of her eye caught only _tall_ and _muscled_ and _blue coat_ — immediately lunged for her, tackling her into the ground.

Theta heard a horrible wailing, and only vaguely understood it to be herself. She threw an elbow back straight into the gut of the person pinning her, causing him to roll off with a strangled groan.

As soon as she was back on her feet and stumbling toward her TARDIS, the others seemed to have kicked into gear, reaching out to grab at her arms and coat.

She put up a good fight against them and managed to get a good bite in one one of the hands yanking at her (human, she noted, by the taste of the blood), but as soon as the fourth came back in she stood no chance.

Her respiratory bypass had fully activated, as she panicked and gasped. Her Ghost Monument, her home, her oldest friend was _right there_ in front of her, but she couldn’t reach it, and for the first time in recent memory she misted with unshed tears while fully awake.

Strangely, the TARDIS was sending _love, comfort, home, trust_ through their psychic link, which Theta Sigma took a bit of offense to given that she was _literally in the process of being kidnapped_.

As she ran through even the oxygen reserves in her respiratory bypass system, her senses all blurred together and were mangled before she could process them.

The last thing she heard before pitching forward into unconsciousness was a soft feminine voice breaking above the surface of the yelling, strong and unwavering though it sounded choked up with tears. “I’m so sorry, Doctor,” it repeated over and over, and Theta slipped into unconsciousness lulled by the mantra.

 _I’m sorry, too, Doctor_ , was her last coherent thought.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Big shout-out to all y'all that have been really encouraging so far! I really appreciate you


	4. Oh You Can Feel How They Love You

She  _ could _ have woken up, presumably, if she wanted to. Perhaps in some manner of speaking she was already awake.

But Theta kept herself carefully buried in the blackness, let the ink run in her ears and in her nose and between her parted lips, let her lungs burn. There was no sound or light here, only muffled hints of the outside world from a distance as she kept herself carefully wrapped away.

Theta Sigma has learned her lesson in the last cell; sometimes the only way to keep your mind intact was to suspend it, preserve it, push away the thoughts trying to chip their way into her inner stronghold.

There were hands on her, somewhere, and words, but she let the blackness seep into her, behind her eyes, and then there was nothing.

It was a long time later when she finally rose to the surface. (Her mind kept trying to tell her the exact length.  _ A long time _ , she told it firmly, attempting to drown it out.)

She allowed her eyes to open the smallest margin, and bright light dizzied her for a moment before resolving into familiar shapes.

Very familiar.  _ Too _ familiar.

From where she laid on her own bed, she could hear the breathing of three bodies in the room. One was a heavy dip on the mattress near her feet, one was off behind her, but the last —

Yaz was in front of her, curled toward her but not touching. She looked miserable, with red-rimmed eyes closed in fitful sleep, dark purple bags underneath, and dried tear-tracks down her cheeks.

Theta stared for a long moment, processing, before the feeling of alarm began to sink in.

She shouldn’t be here. They were all supposed to be  _ home _ and  _ safe _ . To her, they would be forever suspended in that single moment of time right after arriving in Sheffield, so one day she could slip in those coordinates and the Doctor could prance back into their lives.

But instead they were  _ here _ somehow, and hurt badly, if the look of Yaz was anything to go by.

Theta was still disoriented, trying to piece together the bits between the blue planet and here. How did she get back to the TARDIS?

Carefully, listening closely to the steady breathing for signs of awareness, she eased herself off of the bed and padded toward the door. She took one last look into the room. Ryan was still curled at the foot of the bed, and Graham sat sleeping in a recliner chair that had been dragged to the bedside, but Yaz seemed distressed as she reached into the area Theta had just left empty, searching for warmth. Theta’s hearts hurt.

She slipped out carefully, taking a long minute to close the door behind her as silently as possible before starting to make her way towards the console room.

What had  _ happened _ ?

When she got there, it was to the sight of a very familiar person, back turned to her.

She opened her mouth to say his name, but her throat closed up at the last second and only a small wheeze came out.

He turned to her, and they stared at each other for a long moment before his face broke out in a huge relieved smile. “Morning, beautiful,” Jack greeted, eyes too sad for the big smile his face was trying to hold. “How’re you feeling, Doctor?”

She couldn’t help but flinch and Jack, damn his perceptiveness, noted this.

“Are you alright?” he asked a bit quieter, before snorting to himself in dry amusement. “Well, given that you tried to run from  _ this  _ beautiful face —” (accompanied with a dramatic wave at himself that drew out a small smile from her) “— obviously you’re not, but a bit more explanation  _ would _ be very appreciated.”

She opened her mouth again, didn’t know how to respond, closed it. Licked her lips nervously. She wandered around him to the console so she could look at the screen and fiddle with buttons.

He clearly knew what she was doing, but Jack just gave her room and watched, acting as though she were a wild animal he might frighten off at any moment. She might have been annoyed, if that weren’t exactly how she felt.

“They can’t be here,” she said, voice breathy and rough.

“They — you mean your friends?” Jack asked eyebrows pulling together.

Theta nodded. “They were home, they were safe, I could have slipped back into the moment they arrived back on Earth…”

But as Theta spoke, the linear chain of time leading to  _ now _ became clear. If she had gone back to that moment, they would not be here now with this version of her. If she was going to go back in the future, she would have gone back and this would be no issue. Therefore, by the fact that her human companions were on board now with this version of her, it’s safe to infer that she would have never gone back to that time, causing the timelines to proceed without her presence then.

The Doctor never came back for her friends; somehow, Jack found them, they all found her, they got her back to the TARDIS, and here they were.

Theta pressed one hand to the console, telepathically reaching out to her ship to steady herself. Tracing back the threads of causality to this present moment left a golden ache right behind her eyes.

Jack seemed to understand — or perhaps he didn’t; Theta was starting to lose the plot a bit, no thanks to the headache — and he came to stand next to her at the console. 

“They were looking for you,” he told her. “Your friends. Never gave up, really. Managed to dig up old UNIT data based on some off-hand reference you made to it, used that to broadcast a distress signal that I followed, and helped me track down your TARDIS’s signature artron energy to find you.”

“How long was it for them?”

He looked away, down toward the console’s buttons and levers, sparing her an audience as he told her. “Three years.”

Theta closed her eyes. Her mind was a reeling mix of regret, sympathy, and overwhelming guilt at her lingering wish to be allowed to be alone for just a little bit longer.

But — she was never going to go back, not really. Her friends were left there alone for years to wonder if she made it out. Would they hate her once they learned that she had been alive and back in her TARDIS all along? How could they not, after all they went through to search for her, while she pranced about the universe on her own?

Jack reacted to the sound of footsteps behind them faster than she did.

Theta braced herself against the console, knuckles going white with the strength of her grip.

“...Doctor?”

Theta gathered herself, and turned to face Yaz, whose eyes were beginning to mist again at the sight of her. Yaz’s hair was disheveled as though it had not seen a brush in a wee, her pajama shirt was inside out, and her face was etched with grief. Looking at her, Theta Sigma was not sure she had ever seen anyone more beautiful.

When Yaz launched herself forward to sob into Theta’s shoulder, she surprised herself by melting into the embrace — this regeneration had not been physically affectionate, and she had gone centuries without seeing Yasmin Khan, but somehow none of that mattered in the face of Yaz’s open adoration.

The hug was more like a crushing of her ribs, but Theta only wrapped her own arms around her companion. “Hello again, Yasmin Khan,” she whispered, and got ragged sobs as her reply. She ran her fingers through Yaz’s tangled hair, humming a soothing lullaby from her childhood ( _ a fake childhood, memories planted by liars _ , but — focus).

Theta pressed her face against the crown of her head, and wished with her whole soul that she could cry as well, shed her sadness and be born anew.

She wasn’t surprised when she couldn’t. She had wished for so many things, asked for so many answers, but people as old and jaded as her didn’t deserve a reply.

The sound of running filled the hallway before Ryan and Graham both appeared at the doorway to the console room as well, eyes frantic until they landed on her.

Afraid she’d run again, probably. A fair concern. Running is what she knew how to do.

Jack made his way to a random hallway, mouthing a  _ we’ll talk later _ to her with a somber look as he cleared out to allow the “family” reunion.

Without him left to distract her, she was left to face her mistakes, the people she hurt, Her fingers tightened further in Yaz’s jacket as she braced herself for the accusations, the questions, the anger.

Instead, what she got was Yaz sniffling pressed against her, Ryan coming over to join the hug with warm, strong arms, and Graham offering his usual grandfatherly care, with a “have you been eating anything, cockle? You look awfully pale, is all.”

She was confused, and let herself soak up the love radiating off of them for only a few moments more before pulling away to look between their faces. She found only love, and concern, and sadness with no traces of anger, which added to her confusion.

“You’re not… angry?” she asked, hating herself for the way her voice broke on the word.

They shared a look between them.

“To be honest Doctor… I  _ was _ ,” Ryan admitted with a nervous chuckle, and Theta flinched. “For a while. But then we talked about it, and seeing you again, no matter what — that’s what we all agreed was most important.”

Graham nodded, adding, “And now that we  _ have _ seen you, it’s clear you’ve not just been knocking around the universe for kicks with some new humans, leaving us behind. You’ve been through something, even if we don’t know what.  _ Had _ been going through something for a long time, though you didn’t let us in then.”

Yaz looked up into her eyes, spilling her heart out through one look. Brave Yasmin Khan, who wanted to help people, who wanted to see the universe, who wanted more of  _ her _ . Her eyes were a promise for a future Theta wanted so, so badly, but didn’t know how to let herself take.

“I love you, Doctor,” Yaz said, face flushing but determined. “I promised myself if we ever found you again I’d tell you.”

Yaz reached one trembling hand up to cup her face, and she nuzzled into the warmth.

“Please, please let me in.”

Her words were so earnest, so full of love. Theta felt tears spring to her eyes for the first time in — for the first time in this entire regeneration, probably. It felt like absolution. It felt like coming home. She gently guided the hand from her face so she could kiss Yaz’s knuckles, an unspoken promise. She dropped their hands, interlacing their fingers.

There was still so much of her that had been burnt away; she didn’t know if she would be ready for the adventures, the heroics, the grand speeches for a long time yet. But from the husk of who she once was, something new was beginning to bloom.

She turned to address the room, wondering how she could possibly start to repair the shredded life that she had built for herself.

And this was how she began: “The Doctor was born on a planet called Gallifrey, in the constellation of Kasterborous. But as for me, my story starts a much longer time ago, under an abandoned gate reaching toward the stars…”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's the end!
> 
> Thank you to everyone who has left comments and kudos, your support makes writing a lot more fun :-)
> 
> I have a lot of partially-written oneshots and the first chapters of future multichap fics in the works, so definitely plan on seeing more miscellaneous Doctor Who fics from me in the near-ish future.
> 
> (Also if you haven't checked out the titular song, "Burned Out" by Dodie, I very highly recommend doing so; it's what originally inspired this work, so it's the "mood" I was originally aiming for when writing it)

**Author's Note:**

> Kudos/comments/feedback always appreciated!


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